By ashvil on 11/28/2000 9:46 PM

Take a look at emarker - a very innovative device that does some thing magical.

Lots of people, including me, want to know name of the song playing on the Radio. eMarker enables that and also enables you to buy the song if you wish.

This magic is enabled to simple components integrated. The power of the final service is more then the sum of the individual components.

As Dan Bricklin writes (author of the first spreadsheet VisiCalc)
>In addition to doing the right thing at the right place in the system, we also see that you need to know how to break a problem down into its component parts, and solve each problem in the appropriate way.

I would call this a Next Generation Internet application and this would classify as an innovation.

By ashvil on 11/22/2000 6:15 PM

If you are building a brand, these articles will help

http://www.raynet.mcmail.com/product/brandfaq.shtml
Introductory article to Branding and talks about What a Brand is composed of.

http://www.brandoctors.com/brandpos.htm
Brand positioning

http://www.brandoctors.com/outside.htm
Thinking outside the box

http://www.jrcanda.com/art_brandmarriage.html
Give Your Brand in Marriage

http://www.brandoctors.com/nine.html
Nine Critical Issues in Managing Brand Equity

http://www.aniota.com/~jwhite/success0.html
10 Commandments of Power Positioning

http://www.brand.com/speach/work.htm
The Relationship of Brand Strategy and Stock Price

By ashvil on 11/20/2000 8:52 PM

EBay wants to leverage their service lead into the technology front using web services.

By ashvil on 10/23/2000 3:24 PM

Tim talks about the next generation of the web, the one with semantics.

By ashvil on 8/12/2000 9:03 PM

I would define it as a set of tools/services that let you communicate and collaborate better with your colleagues. It essentially allows the power of a group to be more that the sum of it\'s members

This is old problem that has been tried to be solved for generations without much success.

Vannover Bush talks about this in his 1945 paper \"As we may think\".

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework by Douglas Engelbart continued this vision along with Ted Nelson Xanadu project.

Apple\'s Hypercard, Lotus Notes, Taligent, etc. also did some pioneering work in this field but only Tim Berners-Lee WWW had the most major success, but falls far short of his Information Management: A Proposal

By ashvil on 8/12/2000 7:19 PM

Jon Udell has a good book on this called Practical Internet Groupware.

You can read some sample chapters or listen to his interview.

By ashvil on 8/11/2000 4:51 PM

Go to the Yale Style guide.

A must read if you want to build a website!

By ashvil on 8/6/2000 6:20 PM

We have made a major investment in XML and not many folks understand it very well. I hope that this posting with the links help in the understanding. It is very important to understand the role of XML in the next generation Internet.

While you can think of XML as a set of tags in a text file, you would be looking at the one of the legs of the elephant and not view the entire picture. It is the same view as saying C++ and C share very similar syntaxes and are the same, without understanding how Object Oriented programming works and fundamentally changes the approach in programming.

XML is about data. It is a representation of a tree and (using linking) graphs data structures of data elements. While XML can be stored in a text file, it does not have to be.

Let\'s trace the history of computing from a development model standpoint. Each step led to more abstractions.
1. Machine Languages - 01010101 programming
2. Assemby Languages - mov ax, bx
3. High Level Languages - Cobol
4. Procedural Languages - Pascal,C
5. Object Oriented Languages - Small Talk, C++, Java
6. Component Architectures - COM, CORBA, COM+, EJB (Beans), Open Doc
7. Data oriented Architecture - SGML, HTML, XML (XSLT, Xschema, Xlink, etc.)

Please note that 5,6 and 7 are not exclusive. They all solve different problems and all going to be used for building the next generation of systems.

To understand what XML brings to the table, take a look at HTML an application of SGML. All that HTML specifies using tags is what needs to be done. It does not specify how to display bold text on the screen using the tags, it lets the browser know that is needs to make the text bold.

This transfer the intelligence from the HTML file into the browser application that can make the text bold depending on the device is running. On the PC it could draw text in a bold font, a speech browser would use a different voice tone (with emphasis) to render the text.

For more details, Read why HTML is better than Java for User Interface work, thru you could use Java as a language to write the browser.

By adding a layer of abstraction by not specifying how to do things and passing the data only, we can let the application make better judgment on how to do things. It\'s easier and better to tell someone what needs to be done, then how to do it.

So how does XML tell applications what it needs to be done? It Does not. It leaves out the semantics. It concentrates on providing a standard syntax, parser and supporting standards for data interchange. It leaves the semantics to the application to decide what to do with the tags/elements.

Groups of people are building supporting standards on top of XML. The easiest to explain would be SVG, which is a vector graphics specified in a XML format. The SVG browser uses the standard set of XML tools and add the Vector graphics semantics on top that. The SVG files tell the browser what lines have to drawn where but not how to draw them. On Windows, SVG browsers would use MoveTo, LineTo GDI commands, on Java it would the Java 2D API and on the Mac the Mac toolbox API. Again, the application decides how to draw the line; the writer of the SVG file does not care how it is drawn.

This kind of programming model is called declarative programming model. It simplifies the job for the program author. For example, the SVG could be written using a tool like Adobe Illustrator 9 by a graphic designer and would be cross platform on all the SVG browsers.

XML is best suited for describing data for this kind of declarative programming model.

More information on XML and examples can be found with these links

Introduction to XML
http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/general/intro.asp

XML FAQ
http://www.xml-zone.com/xmlfaq.asp
XML in 10 points
http://www.w3.org/XML/1999/XML-in-10-points
What is XML?
http://www.xml.com/pub/98/10/guide1.html
XML, Java, and the future of the Web
http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/sun-info/standards/xml/why/xmlapps.htm

IBM\'s XML Web Site
http://www.ibm.com/developer/xml/

MSDN Online: XML Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/xml/default.asp

The Apache XML Project
http://xml.apache.org

Advanced Links
XML Working draft
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-xml-2e-20000814

W3C XML home page
http://www.w3.org/XML/

XML Hack
http://www.xmlhack.com/

xmlinfo
http://www.xmlinfo.com

Other XML standards
XSL
http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/

XML Schema
http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema.html

XML Query
http://www.w3.org/XML/Query.html

DOM
http://www.w3.org/DOM/

XPath and all
http://www.w3.org/XML/Linking.html

Comments (0)

Technology

 

By ashvil on 8/1/2000 3:18 PM

Definition of Intranet - It is communication medium inside the company for its employees.

So what are we looking for an Intranet
Biz Requirements
1. Message boards this one can be enhanced to meet those needs.
2. Document publishing system lets you publish documents on the Intranet and search them. In effect you are creating a knowledge base. (Zope.org, Midgard-project.org, etc.)
3. Development system  lets you coordinate software development tasks like project management, requirement tracking, bug tracking, etc. (http://sourceforge.net/projects/alexandria/, http://www.tigris.org/ )
4. Email integration, Scheduling and Address book component http://twig.screwdriver.net/
5. Integration of Visual Studio with the Intranet.
6. More requirements will come. For now these are the top items.

Technical Requirements
1. Due to the low speed of Internet connection in India, the Intranet should work even if the link is broken to the main Internet.
2. Use replication and build redundancy to avoid a single point of failure.
3. Use Open Source Software and Open Standards as far as possible.
4. Leverage the work done here, to help build our Micro Services.

We are looking to integrate the work done by various Open Source projects and also from software companies like Microsoft for Office, Visual Studio into a web environment that we can use to communicate.

By ashvil on 7/30/2000 8:17 PM

One of the problems is that most organizations do not have ONE view of the customer, which shows them the customers accounts, the history and in general the relationship with the customer. So every time you (consumer) call you feel like you have to explain everything again and the customer service rep. has to understand you too.

I would list the following changes happening  
a. Customer are more tech savvy and want to be in the driver\'s seat. More customers want the self-service model.

b. Internet growth - This is creating a new channel for self-service. With devices like PDAs, cell phones, etc. It is going to be more accessible.

These changes lead to a different User Expectations of service.

Also, One important point is that Customer Service is NOT equal to Customer complaints. It does not have to be reactionary. We should create a model (and the software needs to reflect this), where customer service starts from the moment a consumer is interested in the product.

For example, if I am interested in buying a digital video camera. I need to be told that I have to buy the lens filter too to protect the camera lens. If that process does not happen, you will end up with an unhappy customer .